INTRODUCTION
Modernizing U.S. military space operations is a critical national endeavor that requires a comprehensive and integrated approach to meet the challenges of an increasingly congested and contested space environment. This article delves into the complexities of this modernization effort, focusing on the ‘‘data management to decision chain’’ – the gathering, integrating, analyzing, and visualizing of vast quantities of disparate data to enable the best decision-making for the warfighter.
Modernizing our national management of space and space systems has become urgent in recent years. It’s crowded up there, with an ever-greater number of assets, junk and debris, and with more nations, including our adversaries and private entities launching satellites. The multitude of space assets produce steady and expanding amounts of data. This surge in space activity necessitates a comprehensive and integrated approach to space data and decision management that can efficiently and effectively integrate and coordinate the multitude of information streams from assets in space and on the ground and serve them up to decision-makers in a timely, accurate fashion to significantly reduce mission risk.
It is a delicate balancing act. On one hand, there’s a need to streamline operations to improve effectiveness, efficiency and speed while reducing costs. This involves integrating old and new systems, a task fraught with technical and operational challenges, as well as compressing decision cycles currently bottlenecked through multiple government agencies, branches of the military, and/or commercial support contractors. On the other hand, there is an urgent need to enhance space capabilities to meet the growing demands of national defense. This requires the development of new technologies and strategies to maximize the potential of our space assets, now and into the future.
The goal is to provide a unified, automated, real-time view of data…
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